April 17, 2017

As I don’t follow college football, much of the lead-up to the NFL draft is just noise to me … mock drafts are fun, but debating the relative value of players from this or that university and how that will or will not translate to the pro league … I usually fall behind reading posts from my usual Vikings bloggers until the draft is imminent. In this case, Christopher Gates posted an interesting retrospective on bad Viking draft classes more than a week ago, and I just got around to reading it now:

For as long as I’ve been writing for this little corner of the internet, I’ve maintained that the Minnesota Vikings’ worst draft class of all time came in the 2005 NFL Draft. From the purple completely blowing it on not one, but two first round picks (wide receiver Troy Williamson and defensive end Erasmus James) and the rest of the class not really amounting to much, that class was pretty dismal.

(And before we get too far into the proceedings, I don’t want to hear about how the Vikings “passed” on Aaron Rodgers in 2005. They had a 27-year old starting quarterback (Daunte Culpepper) that was coming off of a season that saw him throw for over 4,700 yards and 39 touchdowns, and saw him come in second in the NFL MVP voting to a guy that set the single-season record for touchdown passes. The Vikings would have been certifiably bonkers to take a quarterback in the first round that year, and anyone that says otherwise is probably pretty ignorant of history and how the draft actually works.)

But, thanks to another article from behind the great E$PN paywall, I may have to adjust my line of thinking on the worst Vikings’ draft class of all time.

I’ve also long thought that the 2005 draft class was one of the worst-ever for an NFL team, but ESPN makes a good case that the Vikings’ 1989 draft class was even worse:

How bad was the Vikings’ draft class? Here’s ESPN’s description of it:

The Vikings traded their first-round pick to the Steelers for linebacker Mike Merriweather on the eve of the draft, making linebacker David Braxton (second round) their first pick. Braxton joined tight end Darryl Ingram (fourth round) as the only two of the team’s nine draft picks to play a game with Minnesota — and neither lasted long there. The lone bright spot in the Vikings’ draft was running back Brad Baxter (11th round), who went on to score 35 career touchdowns … for the Jets.

Most of those players never played a down for the Vikings, and the team only got 20 game appearances from the entire class (and 16 of those were from Darryl Ingram, who played in every game in his rookie year). That was an atrocious draft class.

Charlie Martin knows about big corporations making themselves look foolish … and far too often doubling down on the stupid:

This whole recent thing with United Airlines has me thinking, once again, about how big organizations act like idiots. […]

Like all good consultants, I have a Model, mostly cribbed from others, based on two observations:

The SNAFU principle: the farther up a hierarchy information has to travel, the more information is lost. This is because no one likes giving people bad news, so the news tends to get better the farther up it goes.

The Peter Principle (modified): people rise in a hierarchy to the limits of their competence in rising in a hierarchy; further, the skill of rising in a hierarchy is largely independent of the skills needed to deal with actual issues.

Of course, the implication of this is something I’ve called Carl’s Corollary (for a friend and co-worker Carl Madison, who first pointed it out). Carl’s Corollary implies that most decisions are being made by people less and less competent to deal with the situation, using increasingly bad information.

Naturally, this results in bad decisions being made. The usual result is that once the bad decision has been made, someone is identified to be responsible, that person is punished, and a new policy is issued to make sure no one makes that mistake again.

[…]

United, though, has a different scheme, clearly. They have a Book, and it Must Be Followed. No one on the ground in Chicago — at least no one in reach of the gate — had the authority to do anything but offer an $800 voucher, which just wasn’t enough. (I can relate. I used to be a “45 weeks a year” road warrior, and there were some nights where if they’d have tried to bump me off a flight home, I would have either killed someone or just thrown myself on the floor of the terminal screaming.) So they followed the Book, and when they couldn’t get Dao to leave, they followed the book again saying he was disruptive, and then the mall airport cops went all Cartman on him…

One of the of the practice questions from our “Growth Rates Are Crucial” video asks you to compare real GDP per capita for two countries that start at the same place, but grow at different rates. It’s a little tricky:

Suppose two countries start with the same real GDP per capita, but country A is growing at 2% per year and country B is growing at 3% per year. After 140 years, country B will have a real GDP per capita that is roughly ________ times higher than country A. (Hint- you may want to review the “Rule of 70” to answer this question.)

We asked our Instructional Designer, Mary Clare Peate, to hold virtual “office hours” to guide you through how to solve this problem. Join her as she discusses your questions!

The liquor board’s cocktail recipe of the month, offered on its website, is for “gin and lemonade,” which you make with a shot of gin and some lemonade. The gin is cherry, so there’s that. Its three recommended beers of the month are themed for the hockey playoffs. They are — I am not kidding — Molson Canadian in a bottle, Molson Canadian in a can, and Molson Canadian in a larger can. The value the LCBO’s adding that a private retailer couldn’t is not obvious.